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It's Elemental, My Dear Bloomingdale

11/26/2016

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Locate That Element!

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Can you locate this element?

By Caitlin Hawke

The location of the last element I featured here which is pictured at right is the carved base and bracket of a two-story oriel window at 312 W. 102nd Street.  

And the winner was…well we didn't have any guesses.  Was the clue too tough?

For round three I am going to ease up.  At top is the element to identify. You remember the rules. The blog feature "It's Elemental" is our version of Name that Tune. So locate the element at top and tell me what it is and where it is.  Extra points for any history or good stories you know about the place it is connected to.

Put your answer in the comments below or email it to: blog@w102-103blockassn.org. Then check back for a future "It's Elemental" post where I will reveal all.
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Last time, I featured this element from a neighborhood building and asked for an identification. Click image to see the last post.
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It is a detail from the facade of this wonderful building constructed in 1905 at 312 W. 102nd Street. It has a twin directly to the east with similiar intricate detailing.

More about 312 W. 102nd Street

Both 310 and 312 W. 102nd Street were designed in the Romanesque or Renaissance Revival style by architect Martin Van Buren Ferdon (1860-1950) and built in 1892.  They are twin buildings laid out between another Ferdon-designed set of twin buildings in an ABBA pattern.  The houses at 310 and 312 are beauties, covered with delicious architectural details, including these sumptuous carvings, plus carved spandrels and a gorgeous cornice. Even the transom is illuminated with gold-filagree decoration around the street number.  It's beautiful!  Ferdon designed many other townhouses on nearby cross streets and on West End Avenue.  Alas, many have been demolished.  He was prolific and worked throughout the city.  The townhouses were originally owned by Alphonse Hogenauer, a real-estate maven.

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A Bootiful Evening in Bloomingdale

11/25/2016

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Halloween 2016

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By Caitlin Hawke

Below, by popular demand, is the 2016 Gallery of Ghouls with major hat tips to neighbor-photographers Ozzie Alfonso and Barbara Boynton whose shots along with a few of mine are all mixed up below.

The annual Halloween Parade and Party comes off each year thanks to Jane Hopkins who coordinates it with a team of dedicated Block Association board members and volunteers.  You'll see many of them disguised as regular neighbors below, but don't let the costumes fool you.  They put in a little elbow grease to make this come together. 

So this is a huge "Thank You!" to the Block Association's volunteers.  Not just for this evening designed for the kid in everyone, but also for all you do throughout the year!  For many of us, community is taking on ever greater importance in a changing city, and it's comforting to know you are all out there.
And, neighbors, to those of you who enjoyed October 31st in our streets or who passed by and liked what you saw, here's something to consider.  Maybe you are new to the neighborhood and were pleased to discover so much spirit and community-minded effort going on here?  Or maybe you've been watching for many years as the kids get older and older but always look forward to this evening and bring their friends from other blocks, too. Or maybe you saw the merriment (and sugar chaos) and fondly remembered being out there yourself as a kid or with your now-grown kids, back in the day.  Yes?

If so, maybe you'd consider getting in the game and helping out the Block Association?  We have room for more volunteers, new board members, and generally helpful input from people who value the kinds of things the Block Association tries to facilitate like spring plantings, fall cleanups, solstice caroling and much more.  Volunteering need not be daunting thought! It can mean all sorts of things including making an ongoing general commitment, helping with a specific regular task, or showing up to be a one-shot helper. Email us to get involved -- a little or a lot: uwsblockassociation@gmail.com. We could really use your help.

And now I give you the evening in pictures. You'll see big kids, medium kids and tiny new kids, who literally just arrived in Bloomingdale.  And the unifying draw was to come out, show off their creativity, live vicariously as an alter ego, hear a story, grab a treat, and just marvel at that undeniable truth:  Kale be cursed! Candy is still king!  At least for one night of the year.

Enjoy the pix!  And thank you for reading.

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Finding Strength in Pain

11/8/2016

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Election Day Arrives at Last

By Caitlin Hawke

A day when a bit of levity is in order.  If only to quell nerves.

As you know, the Block Association keeps it local.  And so does this blog.  For the most part.  I try to resist the urge to go beyond the catchment. Sometimes I stretch. But I do so from the perspective of a neighborhood resident.  And what's going on outside of Bloomingdale matters a lot these days.  Today in particular.

Twitter is lighting up with incredible pictures of Upper West Siders turning out to vote.  And turnout in the catchment is just as impressive.  And with luck we're just half a day from knowing what comes next.

Because, finally it is our turn to smoke out the "elephant in the room" aka Election 2016.  The mammoth has been looming for nearly two years and the closer it has gotten, the higher the stress level has become.

But I have a guilty secret.  For a few weeks, I have been walking on air.  In an alternate or parallel universe, all has been well indeed.  Why? How could this be?

What I am about to say is a might controversial: Bob Dylan earned the Nobel Prize in Literature.  And I am ecstatic.

There.  I said it.  And it has nothing to do with our neighborhood.

Ha! (And here's the stretch.) Let me tie Bob to Bloomingdale in a parlor trick.  About a year ago, Jane Jacobs's son Jim authenticated a song co-authored by Bob Dylan entitled "Listen, Robert Moses."  Here's what Jim Jacobs has said, up to you to believe it or not:
"Jane and Bob Dylan wrote a song together. Jane needed a protest song for the fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York. A friend of ours, Harry Jackson, an artist, had a folk singer sleeping on his floor. He sent Dylan around to the house. Jane helped him, telling him how a protest song was structured and how it worked. I think it was the first protest song he ever wrote.

The song was penned about the Lower Manhattan Expressway, but on the UWS, we know well about the Moses-ification of the city.  Our friends at the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group know of Moses's many connections to our neighborhood's shape.  Incidentally, that group started as the Park West Village History Group in part a response to preserve what Moses had removed -- an old integrated neighborhood -- in favor of UWS development.  I wrote about that here in an old "Throwback Thursday" post.  (For all Throwback Thursdays click here.

And now I have done the undoable. Tied Bob Dylan's Nobel to our neighborhood.  For the record, I don't think the Moses protest song to be one worthy of laurels. It sure is a pretty little piece of NYC history though and it's as fresh today as it was 51 years ago.   If you can't read the lyrics in this image, go to the Gothamist piece.
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Bob on Bob: Dylan takes on Moses (via http://gothamist.com/2016/05/01/confirmed_bob_dylan_did_co-write_a.php)
So, for those who've been stressing about what's going on, here is one certain thing. Bob Dylan's lyricism is real and enduring. Yes, you might not like his voice. And yes, you might have trouble with his seemingly antisocial ways. You may still hate his gospel phase -- but in time that will all be reassessed.  He now stands to receive the highest literary honor our current civilization knows how to bestow.  And for the last few weeks, thanks be to Swedes the world over, it makes me thrill every time I think about it.

So as my gift to you, fellow Bloomingdalers, to lighten the allostatic load today, below is a crazy, racing, unhinged 2011 Grammy performance of Bob Dylan and his progeny.  Ingeniously paired up with Mumford & Sons, The Avett Brothers, a killer horn section and his own band, a mere five years ago Bob Dylan rocked out like the best of them with an electrifying "Maggie's Farm."

The younger bands set the tone with their superlative live performances:  Mumford's "The Cave" where strength is found in pain, the Avett's beautiful "Head Full of Doubt" make the aptest of preludes to the mythic "Maggie's Farm."  Whoever lined them all up in a row darn-tootingly knew what he or she was doing.  And if you read the lyrics of all three today, each of these songs will sparkle with meaning.

[Note: If you are receiving this post via email, the video below won't load, so you'll have to go here and stream it: https://vimeo.com/20567315 for full effect.]

While I recognize this music and these performances will not be everyone's cup of tea, could we agree that a 50-year-old song that resonates today -- and has in ways become even more pertinent -- performed by musicians two or three generations after its time in this incredible fashion is a feat unto itself.

And even if the times haven't changed.  Bob has changed the world. Or at least given it a good shake over the past 70 years he's been roaming around on it.

As he goes on, so do we all...bathed in his incredible wake.

Neighbors, see you on the other side of this November 8th!  And now to Bob. Enjoy!

Mumford & Sons, The Avett Brothers and Bob Dylan Live at 2011 Grammys from Yaroslav Kunitsyn on Vimeo.

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A Weekend of Falling Back

11/4/2016

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With Halloween Behind Us, We Now Head into The Great Fall

By Caitlin Hawke

I'll leave the elephant in the room out of this for the moment as the clock ticks toward our quadrennial ritual of pulling the presidential lever. For this is the weekend we change the clocks, rolling them backward. Nowadays technology does this for most of our clocks...automatically. Making life "easier" and depriving us of this ritual. And in that notion, there is a parable. Technology. Moving backward. Keeping up with time and the times. 

Stay with me here because this brings me to neighborhood news that according to the New York Times yesterday, Bloomingdale is an unwitting character in a new unfolding scandal involving the New York City Marathon and doping of elite runners.  Indeed, you may have walked past surveillance vehicles on our streets as the investigation has spun out.

You can read the tawdry piece for yourself at the link above. Having followed cycling for a while and the vagaries of Lance Armstrong, I have a rubber-necker's fascination about doping in sports. So seeing it come right down the block and, worse, having it afflict my beloved notion of the once-great-but-now-royally-commercial-corporatized New York City Marathon, I wince. But come on, I say to my foolish self. It was hiding in plain sight all these years. And it is everywhere.

Doping. Some claim it's a fair use of technology. Others, an unfair edge. And still others, a public health hazard.

It is perhaps all three. And it is a harbinger of many things to come in this world where cheating is constantly rewarded at the higher ranks of our society and institutions. And technology is the abetting force.
So as I turn back time in my mind to marathons past, Fred Lebow comes to me. Fred watched the clock and established a city tradition that made so many of us dream beyond wildest dreams that we'd trot up that last hill nearing Tavern on the Green and cross the finish line after a whirlwind tour of five boroughs. That we did it hopped up on Skittles and Gatorade alone was a given.  We were the rank and file.

But the elites and powerbrokers and profitmakers the whole world over seem to have a different playbook involving tacitly-approved abuse of technology for profit and gain. Big banks and global consulting agencies now sponsor the major races. This corporate sponsorship has trickled down into many mini races throughout the city all year round with lush purses enticing the world's best athletes. The greater the purse, the more elite runners will come, the better the tv coverage, the more the sponsor's brand will be drilled into your mind and your happy-go-lucky spectating child's mind.

With this incentive structure, that there would be organized and all-but-sanctioned doping should come as a surprise to no one. But where does it end? Probably with consumer pressure. That means us voting with our purse.
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Statue of NYC Marathon founder Fred Lebow in Central Park near the reservoir
It's enough to make you yearn for the days of Rosie Ruiz when cheating was so lo-tech it was quaint, far less lucrative, and relatively detectable.  (All state-sponsored Olympic game doping aside, of course).

Which leads me to reminding you to turn your clocks back on Saturday before you turn in. And to wishing any runners out there a race of your dreams in the city we love this Sunday. We know at least you will run clean.  Be safe and run on home rounding out of the southeast corner of Central Park, westward-bound with the cheering throngs on 59th Street, back into the Park in the shadow of the Gulf & Western Building's ghost. And up, up, up that hill, yes hill, to the finish line.

And of the elephant in the room wherein all these issues coalesce into one great mixed up mess, I say:  for the love of Bloomingdale, vote on Tuesday.  You can find your polling place right here.

See you on the other side of this free fall.


P.S. Look for the 2016 Gallery of Ghouls, the photo recap of the Halloween parade coming soon.

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